lies, leaks, and compromised media

Israeli military whistleblowers have given remarkable testimony about their work inside the settler-colonial state’s propaganda machine. Terms like Israeli ‘psy-op’ and ‘false flag’ are sorely overused, often as low-effort reflexive explanations that skip actual analysis or reporting. Working with investigative reporters from a Hebrew-language outlet named The Hottest Place in Hell, +972 Magazine has helped reveal what working inside what is more correctly called an ‘influence operation’ is actually like.

Inside an Israeli psy-op

Israeli intelligence operations are highly sophisticated and have been widely written about. Israeli media operations are less well reported in detail. Now, personnel from the Israeli military’s Spokesman’s Unit and Israeli journalists who cover the military have:

pointed to a systematic pattern: an obsessive drive to control the public discourse, preferential treatment for “convenient” journalists while sidelining and punishing critical ones, and, above all, an organizational culture of deception.

The Spokesman’s Unit is described as:

the public’s primary gateway to the military, mediated through the press. To obtain information, verify details, or interview military officials, journalists must go through the unit.

This status imbues it with:

a power that… is often abused to distort media coverage, and by extension, the Israeli public’s perception of the army.

The investigators also said:

During the first 14 months of Israel’s war in Gaza, the IDF Spokesperson’s Unit also ran a covert psychological operations campaign aimed at shaping public opinion in Israel and abroad.

Adding:

In parallel to these influence efforts, the unit was tasked with processing and distributing footage from Hamas’ October 7 attack on Israeli communities near Gaza.

Weaponising a massacre

This last task – reformatting 7 October footage for propaganda – was a major operation of itself. It involved soldiers gathering:

large volumes of visual material — including footage filmed by Hamas militants — and reformatted it for rapid circulation on social media platforms.

This later became the basis for the major Israeli propaganda video titled ‘Bearing Witness to the October 7 Massacre’:

a 47-minute compilation of raw footage produced under the supervision of Major (res.) Yuval Horowitz, head of the campaigns division.

One military whistleblower said:

It was like the Wild West — there was no censorship.

The Israeli aim was to get the biggest shock value and a major propaganda win:

We were flooded with material and saw everything. I was in shock, but at the same time, there was pressure to distribute as much as possible — it was like in a social media [advertising campaign]: What works? What doesn’t? What gets attention?

Trust nobody

The same unit also worked on the current Israeli-US attack on Iran. Again their aim was to spin, deceive and lie to achieve the most powerful effect:

“The IDF Spokesperson lies,” one senior military correspondent told The Hottest Place in Hell. “Sometimes it’s about manipulating data, but ultimately the public is the one caught off guard.

A senior military correspondent-turned-whistleblower said:

At the beginning of ‘Operation Roaring Lion’ the IDF claimed it had destroyed 70 percent of Iran’s missile launchers.

Adding that the influence operation relied on public ignorance and journalistic failures as well as Israeli artifice:

We checked and quickly realized it wasn’t accurate — sometimes they hit tunnel entrances, not the launchers themselves, or the launchers kept firing despite being ‘destroyed.’ In major outlets, no one questions it. But when the war ends and rockets are still being fired, the public won’t understand how.

WhatsApp and YouTube ‘psy-ops’

In October and November 2023 – just two weeks apart – a WhatsApp group and YouTube channel both titled ‘Fact Check’ began posting. They were respectively framed as:

a non-profit organization working to provide students with information and facts regarding the ongoing war between Israel and the terrorist organization Hamas.

And a:

non-profit news organization.

In truth, the investigators claim, these accounts were all started by Israeli military propagandists. Between their launch and December 2024 the campaign:

 produced and disseminated dozens of videos advancing Israeli military narratives without disclosing their origin.

Recruiting influencers

The channels were not a success. And the Israeli unit moved on to recruiting influencers with large followings:

the operation recruited dozens of Israeli and pro-Israeli international influencers to amplify messaging coordinated by the military, including Noa Tishby and Sarai Givaty, alongside other figures from Jewish communities abroad. Content was distributed across WhatsApp, YouTube, and Instagram, reaching millions of viewers.

The propaganda advanced pro-Israeli talking points:

These included claims that Jews cannot be considered colonizers in Palestine due to their historical ties to the biblical Kingdom of Judah, while “Arabs” are the true “colonizers of the land”; assertions that Israel’s actions in Gaza do not amount to genocide; and defenses against war crimes allegations against Israel at the International Court of Justice.

One soldier who worked on the influence operation said:

The channels [on YouTube, WhatsApp, and Instagram] targeted foreign audiences and presented themselves as objective and unaffiliated with Israel.

But everything was created within our unit and clearly promoted the Israeli narrative.

That whistleblower described the so-called ‘campaigns division’ as:

the most morally gray area within the IDF Spokesperson’s Unit.

Adding:

At first, it felt urgent to show the world what we had gone through. But very quickly, that shifted. Gaza was being flattened, and the narrative that may have held in the early weeks began to unravel. By the time I was discharged, I felt a deep sense of revulsion at having been part of it.

The investigators their research:

 suggests that this was not an isolated initiative, but part of a broader pattern of psychological operations conducted by the IDF Spokesperson’s Unit.

Fully captured media?

The story also describes how a ‘correspondents cell’ dictates what stories get out, pitches ‘good stories’ to the press and even filters out journalists who are more critical of Israeli actions in favour of more obedient military reporters.

One Hareetz reporter named Yaniv Kubovich said:

The relationship between the IDF Spokesperson and the correspondents’ cell is absurd. The dependency is absolute.

It allows them to decide when we speak and with whom.

Kubovich said:

After October 7, with all the trauma it experienced, the IDF is doing everything it can to suppress reporting that exposes failures, ethical issues, or command shortcomings, instead of examining what actually happened.

+972 and The Hottest Place in Hell are noble exceptions. The state machine has captured the Israeli press. This is the kind of media a dictatorship would be proud to own. Now courageous whistleblowers have gone against the grain of the Israeli propaganda and psy-op machine and informed the public about the true (rather than imagined) extent of Israeli psychological operations.

Journalist and the public should heed their warnings.

Featured image via the Canary